it’s worth mentioning mine is over 10 years old and was that cheap when I bought it. If you can find a fanless design, these will last ages since there’s a few simple non-moving components that do the same kind of work all day every day and don’t take a ton of abuse. Even after all these years, the CPU on mine sits mostly idle even with heavy traffic. Modern software is just very efficient.

Another reason the router/firewall lasts is because I use a dedicated WiFi antenna. This is another part that gets the same work every day. I’ve upgraded mine twice, but it was almost double the speed each time, and I didn’t have to spend extra money on routing hardware that was still plenty powerful.

My setup consists of an x86 “network appliance”. They’re low-cost, low-power, sometime headless units that can run most any open-source software solution. Even with RAM as bad as it is, you can find these for less than $200 from multiple sources if you’re okay with 2.5Gbps. If you did need more than that, you’d have to build something custom likely, unless it’s a small-business class device.

If you’re just getting into the network software side of things, I recommend experimenting off-Internet for a while with a few different operating systems. Find which one has a user-interface you enjoy and can wrap your head around since in a personal homelab, they almost all meet the requirements. My personal choice for software ended up being OPNSense.

I run all of my other services that aren’t network related on separate hardware via a managed switch just to keep things isolated and the rest is up to you.

You can disable that popup and have it start in your Library in the settings window to avoid that btw.

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I had a somewhat similar introduction. My Windows XP ran into a blue screen on boot and I couldn’t afford tech support or a Windows CD to reinstall. This was well before I knew how to pirate software.

So one of the ladies in tech support at my high school recommended I try Ubuntu. I think it was version 8 at the time and had a really charming boot sound.

I was instantly hooked when I came across the GTK/Emerald theming options because I was big into RocketDock at the time but again couldn’t afford to buy it. When I found out you could customize everything all the way to the boot menu without hacking it, I spent the next six months learning the whole system to build it into a fully custom personal theme from boot to desktop.

It took until Proton hit its stride before I could finally daily it but I almost always had it available in the side on at least one or two of my computers.

I have been having excellent luck with MkDocs Material. It’s very lightweight and has a ton of extensibility. Their documentation itself is written using their own software and gives you a great idea of what it has to offer: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/

I use it both at work and for a game squadron wiki. It’s entirely written in Markdown so syntax is pretty quick to learn as well. Not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s become my new go to for documentation.

Archuntu

Slackite

Zorint

I guarantee at least one of these will exist in six months.

I just reduced my codebase by 100% and it’s now running infinitely faster! Thanks!

Unless you’re selling or distributing, you’re pretty welcome to whatever you want with an image you find on the internet. If an artist posts their stuff on the internet and then doesn’t expect people to save a copy, I’m honestly not sure what they were thinking.

While I still tend to stick to the terminal for updating, I still have fond memories of doing everything through Synaptic Package Manager when I first got into Ubuntu in 2009.

Oh my gosh finally! I can enjoy the vector experience! I’ve always felt this was missing from KDE. I would show my friends all the benefits of Linux, but when I showed them by wasting approximately 1-2 minutes, you could embiggen your mouse cursor to absurd proportions, their eyes lit up unlike anything before. They wanted it the moment they knew the potential of infinite cursor sizing.

But I often made the amateur mistake of embiggening a few pixels too far and their delight would rapidly plunge into disappointment as they came to the realization that it was simply scaling up a raster render of the cursor in a lazy post-processed Easter egg.

They all leave the room in a huff, sending my attempts to reach out directly to voicemail, unanswered. But this. This will change everything. Thank you KDE. This is what we had all been waiting for.

Right, but if they’re technically advanced enough to care about system management at that level, they really can’t expect a comfortable and easy introduction. Hence the point of them already knowing what they want by that point.

The whole idea of someone not being sure if they want to use Linux while having an aversion to systemd, a system they likely don’t even have full context for, is just bizarre.

You’re either new and don’t know what you want or you’re someone who already knows well enough if Linux is for you or not, and likely exactly which version you want to use.

I use EndeavourOS for my primary gaming setup and will sometimes go a month or more before I remember to update again. Even with a relatively modern nVidia card, it seems to keep up just fine.

That being said, every vanilla Arch experience has been a disaster by the end and while it’s not the same situation as the meme, you very much have to have a ton of prior knowledge to get a system that actually feels personal and by the point it’s personal enough, getting support for your setup is nigh impossible because it’s so bespoke.

When I first used this trick, they sent me my black hoodie and green text projector in the mail as a prize.

Heck, they won’t even let you into a difficult-to-cancel subscription! What are they thinking? Think of the revenue!

Oh neat! Didn’t know this was a thing. Not something I need, but glad to know it exists.

I’d be surprised if it was anything other than the cheap mechanisms everything else gets. There’s very few companies manufacturing them and Techmoan is always on top of modern cassette systems and hasn’t brought it up. I could always be wrong, though.

Fiio player? If you’re referring to the Echo Mini, it’s just a digital player. It’s just aesthetically a tape player.

Edit: I stand corrected

You might look into some Zachtronics games. Both ExaPunks and Shenzhen I/O require their paper manual counterparts to be played.

The first time I updated some 50 programs by running a single update command, I wondered why it hasn’t been the standard since the start.